Update

Spent the whole week in Berlin, at the BBWF trade-show. It was pretty quiet, but still it hurts your body to stand in the booth for that long. Berlin was nice, actually nicer than I remember, last time I was there (ages ago) it was still a big construction space, now you couldn't see much of that. Otherwise pretty eventless week.

This morning I picked up my iPod touch (yes I am trading the N800 for the iPod Touch, found myself a buyer) and I must say that I am sold. It's too bad that the opensource world has so little success in attracting good graphical designers, the UI of the touch is awesome. Looking forward to hack a bit for it in the future.

Also I pre-ordered the new Mesh DVD, I am such a fan-boy. Hope the material is better than the old Live VHS, it was a ok concert but pretty boring stageshow. This time it looks better, with the back projections and the full band on scene.

Next week I will go to Frankfurt over two days, but nothing else planned for that week. Next weekend is the Apoptygma concert and then my parents arrive for a full week of hanging out. Going to be fun but crowded I guess :-)

General Update

I am god damned tired right now. Yesterday I worked for a lot more hours than usual, because I had to go up very early (4:00) to make a installation at a customer site. That totally destroyed my rhythm so I am still totally lost.

Finished Pattern Recognition by William Gibson yesterday. It was ok, not as good as everyone says it is, but still pretty intense. I think my main objection towards the book is that the main story is pretty strange and in the end it doesn't get really that clear why everything happened the way it did. I have started a new Alistair Reynolds book right now, I'll get back to that.

Talking about intense I played a lot of World in Conflict the last week. It's a strategy game created by a Massive Entertainment from Malmö, Sweden where some of my friends work. It's a great multi player / online game and I recommend it to everyone into strategy.

Next week I am going to South America again, Brazil first and then Argentina. Two trade shows in two weeks. Going to kill me I think.

As for XMMS2, haven't had so much time for this lately. I have worked a bit on the new playlist in Esperanza, it will be pretty cool whenever I have time to release it. You can see a teaser here.

Back in Madrid.

I am back in Europe again, even though my physical body is here my soul is a bit behind (Daimens law of jetlag). The last days in Santiago was pretty good, work-wise it was a much more relaxed trip than it usually is, which of course just means that usually it's insane.

Friday I felt like celebrating, so I went to "Happening" and had a great Argentinan steak. The service and food was as usual excellent and it was sooo cheap. The rest of the night was spent with the movie Equilibrium. I do like the movie a lot, it's a great dystopian universe and Christian Bale does a great role.

For the whole week I tried to figure out what I should do on my Saturday, I ended up just taking an extra trip around the city and not going outside Santiago. So I started to walk from the Hotel over to Domino's (the Santiago hotdog company) and had a Completo. A completo is a Chilean hotdog with avocado, mayo, tomatoes and onion.


After that I took a stroll up the San Cristobal as I have done so many times when I lived in Santiago. The smog was pretty bad that day (as you can see in the pictures) so the city was pretty clouded. It's a pretty intense walk upwards the "Hill" (In a country where the Andes is always visible, a 800m high mountain is considered a hill).


That evening I went out with Sergio and Jenny (old colleague + wife) to a old favorite restaurant "Como Agua para Chocolate", as water to chocolate. The place is mexican type of place with beautiful decor, great food and great presentation of the food.


The trip home was uneventful, I got upgraded to first class because of space problems in economy, I didn't complain much about that. Since I got the "sapphire" status in oneworld the "random" upgrades seems so much more frequent. Not a coincident if you ask me. I couldn't sleep on the plane though, so now I am in for a world of jetlag changes that I hate.

And oh, I am getting my N800 in a couple of hours. :)

Chilean...

It's funny how different the Chilean Spanish is to the Spanish Spanish. I almost forgot how funny and unpronounced they speak here. Some of the language changes I can understand, Chileans has a lot of indian (mapuche) words mixed in their Spanish, for example "Palta" for avocado which is Avacata in Spain. But there are things I never really got my head around... in Chile they never ever use "Vale", an expression for Okey in Spain and they look very funny at you when you say it. They do use "listo" instead (even though they can't pronounce it so it becomes "litto"), which brings us to the way the brutally remove 's' from words...

Anyway... I am still enjoying the fact that I am back in Santiago. Went downtown around lunch today and had some lunch at that place I "always" had lunch when I worked right next to it. Took a stroll around Plaza de Armas and used the metro, it all feels so familiar. Also, I miss the ensalada chilena in Spain, why don't people do it proper but here?

I am thinking about next weekend, maybe I should take a trip up to the andes or go out dancing at the disco place? Dunno yet...

Santiago 25-26th of August.

I am in Santiago for a week doing some work, but it also gives me some times to enjoy the city again. I really really like Santiago even if it shitty cold here right now (around 3-10 Celsius). It feels a bit like coming home again, the streets and houses all look very familiar.

Saturday:
I left Madrid late Friday (or very early Saturday) and arrived Saturday morning in Santiago. I could sleep ok on the airplane and I only had to kill 3-4 hours in the end of trip. I took a cab to the hotel and I had a flash of recognition when I rode the taxi into the city. The rest of the morning was filled with me checking in, unpacking and taking a shower.

I went for a walk from the hotel where I live on Richardo Lyon up towards Tobalaba and my old apartment. A bit of nostalgia hit me when I went up my old stream (Callao). By now it was time for a bit of lunch, so I went to my favorite italian (Tiramisu) and had a pisco sour :-) It was very good, haven't had any in a long long time. After enjoying this very nice meal I took a long walk to Parque Araco. I planned to kill some time by watching a movie and do some shopping. It ended up so that I had to kill some time until the movie started. So I went shopping, got a new pair of trousers, a music dvd with hooverphonic and a nice bottle of wine.

I watched transformers again, it was my second time. I selected that movie mostly because it was the only one that wasn't dubbed to spanish and was somewhat interesting. I still find it a OK film. The action is great and the humor is very funny. But it's not a film that sticks or leaves a impression. After the movie I went and picked up some sushi to take with me to the hotel.

Went home to eat sushi and sleep. I slept well.

Sunday:
Today I just had a walk to Los Leones, had some lunch at Subways and then walked over to a coffeplace and had a dount and coffe. Rest of the afternoon I have spent online. Tonight I will go out for dinner with my friend here in Santiago. Be back with more reports later on :-)

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, Mountain View, CA

For the last week I have been in California for some work and now for the Summer of Code Mentor Summit. If you don't know what Google Summer of Code is you should probably look here. Google wanted a follow-up on their program and invited two people from each successful organization to Mountain View, CA to discuss between mentors how we can improve this to next year.

It has been a wonderful day at Googleplex with lot of sessions, meetings and cold soda. We really got to discuss all the problems that we encountered during the program and made some real progress on how we want to work it out next year. It's funny how much energy it gives you to discuss open source things with open source developers. I am really looking forward to mentor students next summer and I really think I can be a better mentor by really treating the students as students and not "yet-another-opensource-developer".

Apart from discussing the SoC program I found some really nice guys that I got the chance to talk code with. Me and Seb Ruiz (from Amarok fame) had a very productive talk on how we could help each other and share code / standards between XMMS2 and Amarok. Great things might come from this. And I had a lot of time to spend with Ralph Giles from Xiph talking about everything from an XMMS2 ogg-demuxer and the future of vorbis.

All in all I had a wonderful time and I am really happy that I had the chance to be here with all of you.

p.s. Chris DiBona uses XMMS2, cool :-) d.s.